He had something close to a breakdown, he admits. He wrote a script as “therapy,” but found it “free of logic or dramatic thinking” and when he made it, it was without enthusiasm, “using about half of my physical and intellectual capacity.”

Antichrist (Unrated) IFC (104 min.) Directed by Lars von Trier. With Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Now playing in New York.

STEPHEN WHITTY’S RATING: ONE STAR

Rating note: The film contains graphic sex and gory violence.

And now that I’ve seen it, I’m deeply depressed, too.

Also annoyed, confused, and angry that von Trier, who has enormous visual gifts and a great sense of daring, has once again surrendered to his worst instincts and most appalling weaknesses, like his literally medieval morality and horrific misognyny.

The last charge is one that particularly bothers von Trier — and yet one which he does nothing to dispel. Many of his films not only center around good women being brutalized, raped and murdered, but portray their suffering as necessary and their sexuality as dangerous.

“I don’t think of women or their sexuality as evil,” von Trier protests in the press notes for his new film, “Antichrist.” “But it is frightening.”

Frightening? I can imagine a man finding female sexuality to be mysterious, or powerful, or complicated. But frightening? Beware any man who fears women’s sexuality. They walked in Salem once, and they stride in the Middle East today.

And von Trier’s fears are at the core of his disturbing new movie “Antichrist.”

It begins with an cruel slow-motion sequence, in which an angelic toddler dies in a tragic household accident — possible only, the editing suggests, because his mother was busy having sex rather than watching his crib. (In a particularly vicious detail, her climax occurs at the instant of his death.)

She’s broken by grief, not surprisingly. Her husband, a noted psychologist, decides to take charge of her treatment. Off they go to their cabin in the woods — called, unsubtly, “Eden” — where he will coldly and dispassionately force her to confront her fears.

It’s “The Evil Dead,” as directed by Ingmar Bergman, only Bergman had far more forgiveness for his characters than von Trier does. The husband, dully played by Willem Dafoe, is insufferably cold, smug and pushy. The wife, as played with terrific intensity by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is something like a witch. Only she will soon turn the tables on her inquisitor.

What follows in the last third of the movie is what drew headlines at film festivals in Cannes, Toronto and New York — a sadistic auto-da-fe of crushed genitals, self-mutilation, torn limbs, battered faces and never-ending blood, finally ending in some kind of wretched, wrenching expiation.

But the director’s guilt remains his own.

Perhaps von Trier really thinks he’s saying something about the victimization of women by others — something he actually achieved, once, in the terrific “Dancer in the Dark.” Perhaps he thinks he’s produced some parable about faith and grief and despair. (Is it an analyst the wife needs, or a confessor?)

But it’s von Trier who is the victimizer here, and he’s produced nothing more than a beautifully photographed atrocity exhibition, a horror show of a tortured woman torturing others, made by a rapidly tiresome provocateur running out of ways to provoke.